Dear Dr. Braghieri, I read that lately many readers (exclusively of male gender!) Complain that they have received the notorious “two of spades” with the motivation “I see you as a friend”. I therefore decided to win my reluctance and to say mine. First of all I state a couple of things: they are happily single and I have never been the type of boy who can be defined as an adono. In the past, four diametrically opposite episodes have happened to me. I was the one to say “I see you as a friend”. Maybe because I have a refined way of placing me and a good eloquium, some girls in the past made some thoughts about me and decided to take the first step. Obviously I could also have accepted (to the delight of many readers who in this same column have shown that they are followed by philosophy “every left is lost”). In that case perhaps, those same girls, now they would have written to them to declare themselves “seduced and abandoned”. Since I did not feel for them particular attraction of a sexual nature, I preferred to offer them the equally precious feeling of friendship and in all four cases they have never satisfied themselves with this feeling and, using a neologism of teenagers, they “ghostate” me. But I did it above all because I was careful of their friendship! And I melancholy admit that I have experienced an equally strong disappointment for their demonstration of superficiality! I conclude this long confession of mine by sharing a bitter observation that other readers have already done before me: but why is the friendship between people of different sex underestimated?
Cordially
V.
Dear V., I no longer know how to explain that nobody, and I get the right to speak also on behalf of the readers who have sent the emails, considers friendship a lower feeling. But love is love and friendship is friendship. We cannot pretend that people pass from one feeling to another as if nothing had happened.
The cases in which an individual in love agrees to become a friend of the object of his love, of “switching” from one feeling to another and frankly, I find it understandable, are rare. Friendship will also be a sublime feeling but, up to proof contrary, it is without a couple of things that love contemplates. Two examples of all? Attraction and sex.